Hopefully it can actually entice Google into changing it's behavior. The US fines are so small they are a joke, a light tax on doing business.

With a small fine, it's just an annoying cost of doing business. With this ruling, there's a possibility it may actually change the risk/benefit assessment for companies that insist on doing whatever they want with user data.

Maybe the lines of business which require promiscuous data sharing in order to be profitable will stop operating in the EU, and give rise to other business models. Whether these newer ones will be better or worse is not yet known, though the gamble in the EU is that it won't be worse.

... wasn't the case about Android app bundling, not user data?

Breaking the law that applies to is not a sentiment. The same law punished small companies too

If you’re in favor of efforts like the GDPR, why do you call this anti-bigtech sentiment? It’s pro-privacy sentiment.

The GDPR applies to smalltech, too, and smalltech gets fined. For example, an individual got fined €600 about two months ago for pointing a video camera at a shared access road (https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1397)

You can find many more examples of small fines at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/.

The EU appeal the article is about has nothing at all to do with GDPR, user data, or privacy.

It's about anticompetitive behaviour, i.e. antitrust. Antitrust is not particularly about tech companies, and it has been around a long time, since before modern computers.

It's about misusing a position of market dominance to prevent a healthy competitive market from operating. Very large companies which are market-dominant face this problem, but they also have the resources to understand and handle the responsibility. They can either do so, or face fines and injunctions to make them do so. In severe cases they can be forced to break up dominant business units, such as happened with the breakup of AT&T in the USA some years ago.

This is the same sort of thing as might have blocked nVidia from buying ARM, for example (until nVidia pulled out voluntarily). You can see how that has nothing to do with GDPR; it wasn't even in the EU.

GDPR has been pro-big tech according to all the studies i have seen

Studies such as?

> In contrast, there is no evidence that large technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, experienced any reductions in either sales or profits.

I'd say they might need to revise that. I think Google just saw a 4 billion euro reduction in profit.

I expect some kind of:

- common carrier status for “platforms”

- PII laws, broadly

For your first point, that’s more or less what the Digital Market Act is and it was adopted in July. They call “platforms” “gatekeepers” but you got the idea of it. It should become enforceable by Q3 2023.

It is a long time coming and still a long way to go and the surveillance big tech giants should pay a high price for abusing and violating the privacy of hundreds of millions of users.

It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.

> What? Did GPT3 write the parent comment?

No. Why do you think that is?

> This is a multi-billion dollar fine, a $4.1B fine.

As it should be the standard and nothing less than that. Even so, this one is a 'generous' multi-billion dollar fine that won't scare them.

I am saying it needs to be much higher than that. GPT-3 cannot explain itself or its own comments, can it?

Losing 5% of Google's annual profits will absolutely scare the shit out of them.

Consider how much this harms their ability to keep reinvesting the profits into growing the business. A 5% loss is likely sufficient to get them to stop for a moment and rethink their strategy so the punishment won't recur.

> No. Why do you think that is?

Because you lament the lack of a multi-billion dollar fine when the title states that it's a $4B fine. This comes off as nonsensical and disconnected from reality, in a way that triggered "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe it's GPT3".

With that said, I meant it as a joke, not a serious accusation. The likely explanation here is this comes down to the common case of human confusion.

As a tangential aside:

I can only conclude that due to the curse of knowledge, we collectively are overly paranoid about bot commenters on HN. I was just accused of being a bot just two or three days ago.

Cheers and take care.

> Losing 5% of Google's annual profits will absolutely scare the shit out of them.

No it won't. We all know that this won't be the last of such violations from these big tech companies like Google which the EU is disputing and especially when Facebook paid a similar fine to the FTC years ago and is once again still violating the privacy of its users. So it is clear that they still wouldn't change even if the fine is as high as that.

The fact is, they are not scared of these fines. Setting them in the multi-billion dollars should be the standard and the minimum and continuous violations warrant a much higher significant fine than this generous discounted fine which Google knows it can easily afford to do it again.

For them, the violations is worth it and pays more than these so-called generous 'fines'.

> Because you lament the lack of a multi-billion dollar fine when the title states that it's a $4B fine. This comes off as nonsensical and disconnected from reality, in a way that triggered "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe it's GPT3".

Except I already said that 'this' fine "needs to be much larger" and disagreed with the EU's 'generous' fine. I'm talking fines of over $10B dollars, which that still qualifies as 'multi-billions of dollars' and 'much larger' than the EU's small fine. I made myself perfectly clear on my whole point.

So my comment is hardly 'GPT-3 bot' generated.

Sigh, it's never enough for some people.

If the amount of the fine would deal a fatal or nearly fatal blow to the company, they'll simply exit the market and not pay. It's a balancing act.

I'm grateful for the EU setting a good example in this case: a fine which the perp feels is painful, without killing them. This is one proven path to rehabilitation.